Extreme athlete who once performed with Madonna dies in tragic base jumping accident
Andy Lewis, an extreme athlete and slackliner who once performed with Madonna, has died following a base jumping accident in Utah. A second man, who has not yet been named, also died.
Officials have said emergency responders were dispatched on Sunday (14 June) following a report of people injured in a base jumping attempt at Mineral Bottom, a remote desert area near the Utah-Colorado line.
Base jumping is an extreme sport that involves parachuting to the ground after jumping from a tall fixed object such as a building, a bridge or a desert cliff overlooking a deep canyon.
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In a statement, Grand County Sheriff’s Office, said deputies from its office, alongside search and rescue, EMS, and two intermountain helicopters all responded to the scene, where they found a 50-year-old man who died of his injuries at the scene.
A second man, who the Sheriff’s Office confirmed was Andrew ‘Andy’ Lewis from Moab, Utah, also succumbed to his injuries at the scene.
“The Grand Country Sheriff’s Office extends its deepest sympathies to the families, friends, and all those affected by this tragic incident,” the statement ended.
Grand County Sheriff Jamison Wiggins told the Moab Sun News that the two men had been conducting a tandem base jump when the fatal incident occurred.
Lewis, who was nicknamed Sketchy Andy, was highly-regarded in the somewhat niche extreme sports of slacklining and highlining, which combine elements of high-wire walking with aerial acrobatics.
He also appeared on stage alongside Madonna at the Super Bowl XLVI halftime show in 2012.
Dressed in a Roman toga, Lewis bounced and executed tricks on his inch-wide line like it was a trampoline while Madonna sang behind him.
“My phone actually rang itself to death three days in a row,” Lewis said soon afterwards in an appearance on Conan O’Brien’s late-night show.
Lewis owned Base Jump Moab, a business that offered excursions to inexperienced customers using tandem jumps, in which the customer was harnessed to a guide wearing the parachute.
At the same time, Lewis openly acknowledged the sport’s inherent danger.
“It’s weird to think about how many people are dead, because it’s like a normal thing,” Lewis told documentary filmmaker Ella Warnick last year.
Lewis won four straight world championships in competitive slacklining from 2008 through 2011.
He set a Guinness World Record for slackline surfing, swaying his feet side to side in a rocking motion that mimics surfing, while keeping his balance above China’s Diaoshuilou waterfall in 2011.
In 2014, he walked a slackline suspended between two hot air balloons more than 4,000ft above the Nevada desert.
Claire Reid